An analysis of the pragmatic functions of hispanicisms in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the pragmatic functions of the Spanishinduced loanwords, or hispanicisms, used in the novel Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. These borrowed words have been manually extracted and through the software kit AntConc, each occurrence or word token was examined to determine the prevalent pragmatic motivation in each text string: ‘ideational’, ‘expressive’ or ‘textual’. Findings suggest that unadapted borrowings are most widespread, and the vast majority of them correspond to ideationally or referentially motivated loanwords. The assimilation of new referents (i.e., nonexistent in English cultural frames), particularly those related with bullfighting jargon, is linked to the general stylistics of travelogues. Expressive and interpersonal motivations are less frequent, but they might reflect the vernacularization of travel writing and the extended use of euphemisms through lexical borrowing. Alternatively, textual motivations are regularly found through the use of synomyms, co-hyponyms and paraphrases, which are intended to ensure text clarity and coherence.